Bannerless (The Bannerless Saga 1)

She finally abandoned the cornbread and frowned at the crumbs she had scattered over much of the table. “I feel like I’m messing this up. My first lead on a murder, and I’m screwing up. You’d tell me if I was screwing up, yeah?”

“Enid. You’re not screwing up.”

“But you’d tell me.”

“Yes, I would tell you,” he said with some exasperation, and she felt suddenly like a child.

And what would happen if they didn’t figure this out? A villain wins. Some of the perceived authority of the investigators gets chipped away. People here might keep telling her Sero’s death wasn’t important, but that wasn’t true. The stakes were real.

Tomas didn’t give her more calm reassurances, which meant he was worried, too.

“I think I’m going to take a walk,” Enid said, cleaning up the crumbs and finishing off her drink. If Philos and Bounty w

ere violating quotas, there’d be evidence. You just had to know what to look for.

Tomas nodded. “Good hunting.”

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Enid needed to look at the whole of Pasadan as an outsider, with fresh eyes.

Taking the whole afternoon to do it, she walked a circuit not just of Pasadan proper, but of the outlying households, including a creek and a grain mill, a couple of orchards, and miles of farmland growing barley and corn. Pasadan even had a quarry, and a household whose main occupation was making bags of concrete mix they traded up and down the Coast Road. She walked out along the hillside they’d cut into for their limestone, and the gash in the rolling hills made her stomach turn a little. Maybe they all needed concrete, but rock would never grow back and that exposed wound in the land would take years to heal. A half-dozen people worked, some of them digging into the rock with pickaxes, a couple of others carrying broken rock in wheelbarrows to a building where some kind of machinery wheezed and pounded, smashing the rock to powder. They all wore cloth masks over their faces. A chalk-smelling dust seemed to hang in the air around the site. It was all very loud and off-putting.

Pasadan was prosperous. The questions she had to answer: Was it more prosperous than the records said they should be? Were they using more resources than they had a right to? She almost preferred the murder investigation. The town’s general anxiety about an investigation might have nothing to do with Sero’s death. The way to untie a knot might very well be finding the other end of the string Ariana had given her.

Hiding an entire cultivated field of grain was easier than one might expect. It really only required a couple of specific quirks of geography, or a willingness to travel far off a town’s beaten path, into wilderness. Some kind of ravine that could be camouflaged, or some other loud and busy activity distracting from anything unusual.

In her first case, the perpetrators had planted a stand of cottonwoods to disguise the gully they’d used to grow extra oats. From a distance, the place looked like an ordinary copse of trees. But the blind also proved that they knew very well they were doing something wrong. They couldn’t claim ignorance.

Enid searched for those signs here. Which brought her back to the quarry, and the grinding racket and chalky smell that made one want to circle wide around the place. A distraction. A place one wouldn’t look because you assumed you knew what was going on there.

She went straight through the site, ignoring the workers who paused to watch her. Followed the rock cut along the hillside until she left the quarry behind, and the hill turned into exactly the kind of gully she was looking for. Tall meadow grasses gave way to stalks of cultivated barley. From a distance, you couldn’t tell the difference. You’d have to walk right up to the field in order to learn what exactly was growing here.

A ton of work, cultivating an awkward out-of-the-way field like this, just to avoid drawing attention. Much easier to petition for a higher quota . . . except a petition could be denied.

So, someone in Pasadan—Philos, according to Ariana—was growing grain outside their quota. Likely using it for trade in small quantities to avoid raising suspicions. But they could acquire extra cloth, foodstuffs, incidentals. Lumber for fencing and paint for pretty signs. None of it by itself was suspicious—lots of places had pretty signs. But all of it together made a picture.

Now she and Tomas had two investigations to conduct.

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“Might Sero have known?” Enid asked Tomas. She’d pulled some stalks of grain from the hidden field—just a couple of weeks from harvest, if she judged it right—to show to him. “Might he have threatened to report it? Might that be a motive to hurt him?”

“Except he didn’t talk to anyone,” Tomas said. “That’s what everyone says. Wasn’t like he’d be motivated to report it.”

“Maybe. But . . . Tomas—if the extra grain was to try to get a banner quicker, then everyone in town who wanted a banner might have a motive.”

“For violating quota. But not for killing Sero. We’re only speculating that he knew, that the two cases are at all connected.”

“If he knew, would he have told anyone?”

He thought for a moment, until a connection lit in his eyes. “Miran. If she was the last person to speak with him, he might have told her something.”

“Let’s talk to her again,” Enid said.

They decided to bring Miran to the community house, to the meeting room they’d made their own for the investigation. Their own territory. Since Enid had talked with her before, she went to Sirius household to get the young woman. It would rile folk, seeing an investigator escorting one of their own, and word of that would spread just as fast as word of their arrival at Pasadan had. That they were focusing attention on such a young and demure thing—people would read that badly, and Enid was almost glad for it.

Back at Sirius household, the wash had been taken in and the chickens were safe in their coop. Enid heard voices from what must have been a kitchen but didn’t see any sign of Miran. Instead, an older woman was working in a standard kitchen garden, picking herbs—chives, looked like.